Dmitri Shostakovich

Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg on 25 September 1906 into a family of Polish Catholic heritage. His talent was spotted at the aged of eight, when he took piano lessons with his mother.

In 1919 he entered Glazunov's St Petersburg Conservatory, studying piano with Leonid Nikolayev and later Elena Rozanova, composition with Maximilian Steinberg and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolay Sokolov. His first major piece was his first Symphony, written as his graduation piece when he was twenty.

Life was to be difficult for an artist working within the Soviet regime, and already, political pressure was building. He was perceived to lack political zeal, and he failed an exam in Marxist methodology.

He began a double career - as both composer and pianist. When his dry performing style failed to impress some, and when Bruno Walter championed Shostakovich's symphony, performing it in Berlin in 1927, the young composer began to concentrate his efforts on composition, from then on playing mostly only his own music.

The story of his life is largely that of a battle with the Soviet authorities. Twice he fell from grace - in 1936 and 1948. On the first occasion, probably instigated by Stalin, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (which had been immediately successful in 1934) was condemned as formalist, coarse, primitive and vulgar. As a result, his income dropped to about 25% of its previous level.

During the war, much of the Leningrad Symphony was written whilst Shostakovich and his family remained in the city under German siege. He added to wartime propaganda, having his picture taken as a fire warden and broadcasting to the Soviet people. The symphony, once completed, was adopted as a symbol of Russian resistance, in both the East and the West.

In 1948 many composers, Shostakovich included, were denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. This time, most of his music was banned, and privileges were withdrawn from his family. The restrictions were lifted in 1949, but it was not until 1953, when Stalin died, that Shostakovich's official rehabilitation began.

In 1960 he was blackmailed into joining the Communist Party, and it was at this time that his health started to deteriorate, and the music began to be flavoured by Shostakovich's obsession with his own mortality.

He died in Moscow, of lung cancer, on 9 August 1975, and the authorities spent three days approving his official obituary before publication in Pravda.

Shostakovich's eclectic music is basically conservative - tonal and Romantic - but with elements of atonality and chromaticism, and sometimes tone rows. It makes much use of contrast between the static and the dynamic.